


Don't Be Chosen

by sharivan



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-16
Updated: 2015-08-16
Packaged: 2018-04-14 23:01:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,139
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4583421
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sharivan/pseuds/sharivan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She doesn't see a good way to explain this. So Mary gets in the car and drives to the police station and, red-eyed, starting to bruise where the demon grabbed her, says Sam Campbell went crazy and killed Deanna and John before dying himself.</p>
<p>They don't exactly believe her but the evidence is hard to ignore.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Don't Be Chosen

When the demon who has killed the people she loves offers her a deal, Mary says no.

She says some other things too. Doesn't swear eternal vengeance because that's too obvious to say out loud when she is crying and shaking, while her heart beats too fast, but she swears a little.

And the yellow-eyed _thing_ in her father's body laughs at her and says, "Your choice," and disappears.

Her father's body falls to the ground and Mary sinks down after it.

She finds there's really no point at which she's done crying, given what happened that day, but after a while her arms are as damp as her face from wiping away tears and mucus and she's getting a headache. It occurs to her that she is in the woods with two dead bodies, both brutally killed. Mary doesn't really want to go to jail. She doesn't want to go to the police either. She probably shouldn't drive but then sitting in the woods with corpses isn't that conducive to calming the hell down.

She doesn't see a good way to explain this. So Mary gets in the car and drives to the police station and, red-eyed, starting to bruise where the demon grabbed her, says Sam Campbell went crazy and killed Deanna and John before dying himself.

They don't exactly believe her but the evidence is hard to ignore. She goes to every funeral. She packs up the important things and hires a real estate agent to sell the house. Then she leaves Lawrence in her father's pickup truck.

***

Mary doesn't have a ton of marketable job skills as the ability to identify and kill monsters is tricky to monetize. She's not exactly _okay_ either, and even less-than-reputable employers hesitate to hire a young woman so prone to staring blankly ahead and hitting anyone who comes up behind her.

She works for cash under the table, no more than a day or two in any one place. Hustles pool once or twice but finds it attracts more attention than it's worth. She shoplifts, a skill that owes more to her middle school friends than her parents. She sleeps in YWCAs, in women's shelters, in her truck. She reads the newspapers to decide where to go next.

She rarely hunted alone before...before. Now it's the only way she does, going after ghosts and shifters and other things she can handle on her own. When she runs into other hunters she doesn't say much, just enough to figure it out if she needs to stick around or can leave the job to them. Mary had never realized just how bitter, how personally angry most hunters were at the horrors of the world when she hunted with her family. No one asks too many questions.

***

One day she's in a hardware store when an older man stares at her and says, "Aren't you Deanna Campbell's girl?"

She says yes.

***

She spends more time talking to hunters after that. Mary is a Campbell, the last of her family, and she said no to a prince of hell. Or a something of hell, with those too-bright eyes. When she asks after portents, by God her people answer. They listen when she frowns and suggests a different plan of attack. It's...nice.

She sleeps with hunters sometimes, and with sweet boys who think they're dangerous but know nothing about the monsters that aren't as human as they look. She gets pregnant and thinks, I can't hunt like this. She thinks, what will I do with a child? She thinks, Deanna Campbell, and decides to have the baby. She names him for her mother.

***

Mary slows down for a while because no one has the time to save the fucking world while single-handedly caring for a newborn; someone else can pick up the slack. She gets a month-to-month lease in a quiet city and _stays_ there, her first fixed address and phone number in over a year. Hunters call her sometimes and ask for advice or tell her about something that might be demonic. It's nice.

Dean gets a little older and fucking sleeps once in a while and she tells him stories where good triumphs over evil, sings songs about nothing at all.

***

People know her name in the place where she lives and it doesn't make them shy away from her or wonder out loud if murder is in the blood. (It is, of course, but not the way they meant.) She leaves Dean sometimes with the children of other hunters, girls and boys who know the value of salt and a good knife. They aren't in awe of her; she is just another of their parents' friends, another woman with shadowed eyes and too many weapons. She walks alone through the city like she once did, she drinks in shady bars and flirts or glares or talks business as the mood takes her. Sometimes she hunts.

She has another child, this one less of a surprise. She had wanted so _badly_ to be normal, when she was someone else, but it seems to Mary that's exactly what this is. She has her children, who will be raised in a community of hunters to be able to look after themselves, and she has her work, and she has friends. She is, despite all her expectations, happy. Mary's not sure if her parents thought she'd come to this conclusion but she hopes they did. She hopes they expected she would be as happy and safe as the world allows - less than ideal, but enough to get on with.

***

Some hunters, the ones who fell into the life by accident, are always moving. But there are the people like her parents and the Harvelles, at peace with the existence of monsters, who don't spend their entire lives chasing after them. And hundreds more people who will stitch someone up and only ask important questions like 'is the flesh likely to rot?'; people who offered a couch and a meal to those who knew how to ask for them; people whose ideas of trauma and psychosis were a little different than most. Mary wasn't one of a handful of quixotic idiots but one soldier among legions, serving in her own way. She makes friends with folks in support roles who have a wider network than her own. She makes the occasional road trip, which take on new tension with two tiny children along for the ride.

*** 

Mary starts to hear rumors of house fires, of mysterious deaths in households with new babies. The night a demon comes to visit her youngest son it finds all three Campbells in a salt circle. Mary holds the Colt in one hand and the words of an exorcism in the other. They all make it through the night.


End file.
